


Cross My Heart

by Aestheticdenbrough



Category: IT (1990), IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Car Accidents, Deaf Character, Friendship, Lip reading, Multi, Other, Pirates, Play Pretend, Prologue, Sign Language, Trains, deaf Bill denbrough, eddie loves trains, richie likes to be a pirate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2019-09-18 03:28:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16987272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aestheticdenbrough/pseuds/Aestheticdenbrough
Summary: Bill Denbrough has been mostly deaf since the age of three years old after an accident that damaged his cochlea. Despite his challenges he makes some friends along the way.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> no beta we die unedited like men

Bill Denbrough wasn’t born without his hearing, most deaf people aren’t actually. For many it’s lost gradually over the course of a few years. For him, it was all in one day. He was three years old and outside playing catch with his dad, the blown up rubber ball flying through the air back and forth pretty steadily, he has good aim, at least for only being a toddler.

Zach throws the ball and it starts rolling past the small ginger and into the road. It looks pretty barren, so being his determined self he’d gone to retrieve it, leaving his father in the driveway. What he didn’t notice was a car on it’s way down the road from the side he didn’t look to. He’s too short to be seen by the driver through the window. Who would have known that a rubber ball would change the course of his entire life.

There’s a crash, something shifts. And after only a few moments, three year old Bill Denbrough is laying on the pavement, the car stopped in shock. His eyes closed, his face bleeding. It never should have happened, but it did, and he’ll be dealing with it now. He spends a few weeks in the hospital, at first it seemed dire but he made slow improvements.

His head was bandaged up, he responds to light and touch now when he’s awake, but sound doesn’t seem to break the barrier between him and others. He cries out and nobody knows why, and he doesn’t even know he has. The crash had caused damage to his cochlea and the small bones around his ear, particularly the anvil. He no longer has his hearing and it probably won’t be coming back.

His parents start him in speech therapy as soon as he’s healed enough. Sharon and Zach Denbrough don’t have the energy for learning a new language, especially one done entirely with the hands. The only intricate thing Sharon Denbrough does with her hands is play piano, and she fears that ASL would bring on arthritis or somehow inhibit her skills, and she isn’t willing to give that up after all those years of classical training.

He’s able to keep his voice, and he does talk, just not much. He’s never been a very confident child, but now he can’t even hear his own words as they exit his mouth, so he just mostly stops. He talks when he needs to, but after he turns five years old and starts kindergarten, he makes a friend named Eddie Kaspbrak.

Eddie Kaspbrak is a small firecracker, he’s loud and bossy at first, he’ll even talk for Bill in some events. Bill doesn’t mind though, at this point he doesn’t feel the need to be independent. As he grows older though, he starts nudging Eddie when he starts talking over him, wanting to be more self sufficient. Suddenly he’s the bossy one, and Eddie doesn’t mind. It’s nice to watch him grow into someone more confident.

Bill starts to learn sign too, he’s clumsy with his hands at first, but soon he uses it to communicate with everyone who understands it. Eddie is the first person he gives a sign name. Fire with an E hand. Eddie the firecracker.

His brother is born when he’s six years old. The lucky thing is, that unlike his parents, he can’t be woken by the cries of the new infant. Life is just as it should be for a while. He teaches the younger boy simple signs as he grows months older, though Sharon and Zach probably don’t even know as much as baby Georgie does, aside from the alphabet that they’d used mostly in the hospital to communicate.

Life goes on easy, he meets Richie Tozier on the playground when he’s seven years old. Richie is so loud when he laughs sometimes that Bill can hear his muffled cackle, not having full hearing loss, just enough not to be able to hear unless someone is shouting at him specifically. Bill learns Richie’s definition of “sex” in the second grade. It becomes his namesake, the sign for wise with an R hand. The name sticks even after the true fifth grade sex talk they get in health class, he’s proved himself in other ways.

Stanley Uris meets them soon after, it’s hard to come up with a name to call him, most signs that Bil relates to him all use really specific hand motions where he couldn’t incorporate Stanley’s s into them. Instead he takes to simply calling Stanley bird, mirrored by the dark haired boy’s interest in the species mixed with his tall and thin frame. Bird fits him nicely.

At some point in October in the sixth grade Bill’s little brother goes missing. This time he hears his mother’s cries at the funeral, but she doesn’t cry again after that.

Next comes in Beverly Marsh, a sweet face with green eyes and thin lips. Her worn sweater doesn’t make her seem lesser to Bill the way most people see her. Her name sign becomes “beautiful” with a B hand even before he talks to her, used only to his friends in otherwise empty rooms accompanied by happy noises. Once she joins the losers at their lunch table she learns her name sign but without an explanation as to what it means.

Ben Hanscom moves to Derry, Maine from Houston, Texas where he’s lived since he was a young boy. Originally, Bill and the losers refer to him as “outsider”. Soon enough though, they realize he’s quite like the rest of them. He becomes the sign “glue” with a B hand. It comes from a certain art class and a prank where Richie peels Elmer’s glue off his hand like dead skin and Ben almost threw up in the art room trash. It doesn’t contradict his role in the group though.

Finally, they Meet a boy named Mike Hanlon. Richie calls him homeschool, but Bill claims his name as “morning” with an M hand. He’s always up before the sun and with the rooster’s call, and always a brightening presence among the group. Now a group of seven, a lucky number in any of their books. A lucky friendship formed by unlucky experiences.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill's first day of kindergarten comes all too soon for the Denbrough family, but Bill takes it with stride nonetheless.

Starting school was always expected to be one hell of a journey for Bill Denbrough. He went almost completely Deaf just two years before and spent a long time in the hospital and then straight into speech therapy. Sharon and Zack plan to get him a cochlear implant as soon as they can afford it without going into major debt because they very much so are not interested in learning ASL. For now though, they just have him practicing his speech and his lip reading in hopes that it can get him through his first few crucial years of schooling without too many hiccups or issues. His speech therapist teaches him a bit of sign as well without letting his parents know specifically, genuinely for the purpose of making the communication between she and him more easy and accurate.

He makes good progress though his lessons. He can’t seem to shake a stutter though, and it makes it harder for him to talk because the closest he can get to being able to tell that it’s happening is the way he feels his lips move. He’s good at forming his words though, and he retains most of his speaking ability from before the incident and gains some. He turns five years old on April 24th and then has to start school the following September. Sharon and Zack look forward to it, particularly so that he can spend his days somewhere besides always with them and trying to communicate in ways they still don’t fully understand. He prepares on the morning of September first with his blue Transformers backpack and his tin lunchbox with the ninja turtles on it, they don’t match but they do show two of his favorite things. Subtitles, he’s learned, are his best friend, he probably has a reading ability far above his peers due to the need for it. At least he has that going for him among his disadvantages.

The bus ride to Derry Elementary is usually the most fun yet anxiety inducing part of a child’s first day of school. But for Bill it’s not much, the loud voices of the children only muted to a dull roar in the back of his head, it is a bit exciting though. He almost hopes that his peers are always this loud, he doesn’t usually get to stimulate this part of his brain at all, his house isn’t very loud the majority of the time, and when it is it’s his parents yelling angrily which isn’t something he would want to hear. The laughter of many children his age though? An ideal sound for his five year old self, he feels less isolated. The bumps of potholes bring cheers from the older kids, definitely not their first time on the bus to the public school. It’s not their first rodeo so they know exactly how to enjoy this as if it’s a party. They know they won’t get homework or much to do, they just get to see their friends again after a three month buffer period. Bill can’t wait to have that moment next year, to have some sort of friends.

The ride finally does end, and thankfully this year none of the kindergarteners threw up or freaked out too much. The bus stops in front of the school at last and the doors open with a squeaky sigh of relief, one that matches the mood of the poor bus driver who is rubbing the space between his eyebrows. He tells himself every year that he’s too old for this and the next year he’ll retire, but he’s been telling himself that for nearly thirteen years and it seems that he’ll only quit once he’s old enough to have his driver’s license taken away, he loves these kids too much deep down somewhere inside of him. At least it keeps him in line with the real world instead of just his mornings at the kitchen table with his coffee and the morning paper. The kids who aren’t already standing in the aisles rise from their seats to push and shove their way off the bus and into the still warmed September air before walking into the too hot school where they have yet to get the air conditioning working again. Typical for a public school.

Bill walks down the steps of the bus out onto the sidewalk in front of the school. He looks ahead to the big, brown, brick building. He pulls his disposable camera from the side pocket of his backpack and aims it in front of his right eye and snaps a picture of it, just for the memories. He wants to start a journal of some sort and having some photos would be great. He loves visual representations of everything he can, all of his senses besides hearing is about what he uses, it can be mundane or exciting, depending on how new the stimulus is. School is definitely an exciting one. He sets out forward to the double glass front doors, probably letting out a cry he can’t hear at how he gets pushed and shoved and jostled until he nearly falls flat on his can on the pavement. But he catches his balance and successfully gets himself inside, looking around the hallway. There’s a banner of the cursive alphabet running across the top of the wall up by the ceiling, and it transitions into the numbers through five hundred down to the end of the hallway. It’s all very colorful, nothing like the schools he’s seen on tv shows, though those are usually meant to mimic high schools. He quite likes it really, it gives a more friendly atmosphere than he had expected to meet on his first day.

He walks slowly down the hall, looking to classrooms as he goes. There’s only one or two classes per grade, the town of Derry is pretty small and the majority is populated by the elderly people who have lived here their entire lives, most younger ones move out the first chance they get. Usually down to Bagour or even west to New York. Kids from small towns with big dreams are what keeps the place running. He reads the papers outside the classrooms, looking for the one that has his name printed on it. He finally does and he looks inside. There’s a few kids in there so far but not many. Most of the kindergarten class comes with their parents in their cars and not by bus so the majority hasn’t even arrived on the school grounds yet. There’s a girl with hair as red as Bill’s that goes just past her shoulders sitting at a table in a red metal chair, and then one with a deep brown hair over by the cubbies with his mom and his dad. His backpack has the teenage mutant ninja turtles on it too, just like Bill’s lunch box. It brings a smile to the boy’s face when he sees that, but he decides not to approach the other boy when his parents are still around. Sometimes he even forgets he’s different, forgets that other kids can hear, so at this time he’s not really nervous about that getting in the way of him making some great friends just like everyone else.

He finds his own cubby, a wood box with his name printed on a cute little colorful piece of paper. “William Denbrough” in scrawly handwriting, done either by the teacher or one of her assistants, there’s probably at least three college students in Derry who aim to be teachers one day, so many of them intern at the Elementary school and do a lot of the bits and bobs of work that the licensed teachers don’t particularly want or need to do, things like writing name tags for the kids and other things that have nothing to do with the curriculum of the actual class itself. He unzips his backpack to pull out his green notebook and a pack of wooden ticonderoga pencils, he’s excited about these. They're pre sharpened and the tone of gray seems perfect to sketch in. at least to him, still a very young child who knows very little about art except for the joy it brings him. He hangs the backpack on the little metal hook and places his tin lunchbox on the shelf above it. He hugs the notebook to his chest and holds his pack of pencils in one hand with his stubby fingers grasped around it. He walks around the classroom and eyes the tables to find his own seat. His is near the front of the classroom with another kid who has a last name starting with a D and next to another with a last name that starts with a C. He puts down the notebook and the pencils and slides into the blue metal chair and looks down at his hands on the table. His fingernails are chewed down, he wishes he’d just let his mother cut them instead of letting himself bite them when he was anxious. His hands are thin and agile for a child, mostly due to his constant signing. He doesn’t sign to his parents, only to his speech therapist, and he’s never admit that he does it in the bathroom mirror when he’s alone for practice.

He looks up when a whiney but booming voice take its presence in the classroom. He looks up to see a large women with a small boy holding her hand. She is carrying his backpack on one shoulder and a container of clorox wipes in her free hand. Her voice is shrill and carries power. What she’s saying is completely muffled so he can only guess that it’s something not good based on the little bits and pieces of the sound that he can pick up. He chews his lip, pulling off a piece of dry and chapped skin in the process by accident, running his tongue over it to make sure the removed skin doesn’t make him bleed any. That wouldn’t be the best start to his first day of school, at least he turns out not to be. He finally looks back down at his hands, not wanting to feel creepy about staring at the little boy who’s very obviously embarrassed by the behavior of his mom. He knows how that can feel. The mother releases the hand of the small boy and goes around to some of the tables and wipes them down with her wipes. Kindergarten parents are usually scared of the germ infestation that is a public school, so this behavior isn’t seen as entirely abnormal to the teacher, just a concerned parent. Then the woman pulls out a big ziplock bag full of what looks to be medications all rattling around in there. She starts explaining that her son is very weak and that if the government wouldn’t arrest her for truancy she would never send him to school at all, and these are all the medications he takes every day and some for just emergencies, and his inhaler is buried somewhere in there but he also keeps one on him at all times just on his own and her high pitched rambling just seems to go on and on and it’s even worse to Bill because he has to hear it extremely muffled and have no clue what she’s actually talking about. 

When he does look up again he sees that the boy is sitting down, his chin resting on his hands and his elbows on the table. He’s looking down just like Bill had been, his cheeks flushed with embarrassment still. The large woman with the frizzy brown hair that looks like a less kept version of her son’s goes over to him again after putting his things away, feeling his face with the back of her hands worriedly, mumbling something to him, Bill would try to read her lips but her face is still aimed too oddly to get a good idea of what she’s saying to him before he pushes her away with both hands, looking about ready to start crying out of the frustration of her still being here. He doesn’t look as frail as she tries to describe him to people, he’s generally much more capable than she’d like everyone to believe, she doesn’t even believe that he’s capable, all these years of lying and telling herself that has made her truly believe it and it’s not likely than her mind can ever be changed from that.

Bill decides to let his eyes wander over the classroom. The teacher is walking around making conversation with the kids’ parents as they arrive in with their children, directing them on what they’re to do with their kids’ things and giving them the syllabus that the students are too young to understand. The kids who came without parents this morning will take the printed paper home to their parents in their folders in order to get it signed instead. She seems like a sweet and well organized woman, not new to this line of work and more than used to dealing with the first day panic. The walls are cream colored and the carpet is black with flecks of random rainbow colors scattered through. There’s a tiled area near the back of the classroom with another long table and a counter with two sinks, two bottles of hand soap and one roll of paper towel to dry their hands after washing them. Next to the counter and against the other wall is a cabinet where the teacher keeps the materials used for snack time and forks and spoons for birthday treats, as well as where she’ll keep that boy’s bag of meds.

Bill jumps when a finger taps his shoulder and notices a kid who probably had been trying to talk to him for a while before he tapped him to see if he was actually paying attention. He’s standing above the chair next to him with the last name starting with a C. “Edward Corcoran”. He’s getting obviously increasingly frustrated with Bill’s lack of response to his talking and it’s overwhelming to Bill for a few moments and he doesn’t know how to react. He thinks over and over in his head what he wants to say, hoping that he’s trained his vocal cords enough to align with what he wants to say, especially considering this is something he’ll probably be saying a lot of in these next few days, and probably the rest of his life. “I’m Deaf,” he blurts out, shocking the boy with the accent that comes with Bill’s voice, the one that signifies that he really can’t hear what he’s saying. It’s what Bill will one day learn that people call a Deaf accent, and for a while he’ll consider it embarrassing but it’ll eventually become a source of pride in him. A way to say “yeah I can’t hear, but I can still talk anyways!” without even saying those specific words. The Corcoran boy nods simply to him and sits in his seat, saying sorry in a loud and enunciated voice. Bill can hear it the littlest bit but reading his lips proves to be more helpful. “T-talking louder doesn’t h-help as much as speaking clearly,” Bill tries to force out, it comes out messily but still mostly recognizable.

Another child takes a place at the same table, Greta Bowie, her name turns out to be based on the card at her place. She is wearing a pink polo dress with a blue collar that matches the little puff balls on the hair tie keeping her hair in a neat ponytail, slick until the ponytail and then it comes down in blonde waves. She offers them a smile with her small, crooked teeth. She seems nice enough, and not nervous like the other kids. She holds the skirt of her dress down as she sits down on it, leaning forward onto the table and resting her chin on her forearms with a tired yawn. She’s not used to waking up this early to leave the house, none of them are. They will get used to it though. Ed says something that makes her giggle, Bill can tell by the she sits up and her expression crumples up in joy. He feels a bit left out so he laughs too, only gaining some odd and confused looks from the both of them before they go back to laughing together. Another little girl comes over to talk to Greta, even though she doesn’t sit over here. She wants to show off the new shoes her mom got her for her first day of school. She stomps her foot and they light up in bright shades of color, which all four of the kids in this part of the room marvel at. If you have shoes that light up, you’re basically already the coolest kid in your class.

The teacher goes to the front of the room and claps her hands to get the attention of the students to make some announcements. She looks almost directly at Bill as she speaks so that he can read her lips and it comes as an immense relief to him that at least she’ll try to cater to him so he can understand what’s going on. She talks about how today they’ll just be introducing themselves and maybe even getting to color in some coloring pages with the expansive collection of Crayola products that she’s collected over the years. This excites Bill even though he probably will continue to feel a bit left out from everyone else. He can’t pay attention to people speaking and do anything else at the same time because he needs to be studying their mouth as it moves to deduce the message they’re trying to get across. He watches the teacher point at the boy with the last name that starts with a letter A to start the activity. She needs to say her full name and her favorite color and if she has any pets. A pretty simple way to introduce themselves, plus most little kids really do like animals, and talking about their pets isn’t hard at all. Her name is Janet and she doesn’t like people to actually call her Janet and he favorite color is periwinkle and she has a bunny named Gill.

The next three students go and Bill pays close attention, it might be easier to make friends if he has something about them to go off of to talk about to show that he actually wants to know about them. Then it finally comes time for him to do his own introduction. “I’m Bill Denbrough, I’m Deaf, I like yellow and I have a hamster,” he says, letting out a sigh when he doesn’t get too many weird looks so he assumes he said it all correctly, he wasn’t sure if he would but he sure as heck is glad he did. It gives him hope that he’ll fit in at least most of the time at this school. The class keeps going with their intros without issue even though Bill’s heart is still basically racing with adrenaline on what he just was able to do. He hardly talks to his own parents and now he just spoke to a classroom of his peers and supposedly didn’t make any mistakes. Snack time comes and they’re allowed to walk around and talk again instead of just sitting in their seats and just listening to each other’s greetings. He remembers another kid called Eddie that wasn’t that Eddie Corcoran boy, he was the one who looked so red and embarrasses earlier, but he didn’t seem to have much issue talking to the class, though Bill obviously wouldn’t be able to hear the fact that Eddie Kaspbrak’s voice shook ferociously as he tried to explain the simple facts about himself. How he likes the color red because it makes him feel powerful and how he doesn’t have a pet except for the imaginary kind because his mom won’t let him have anything real because she thinks they’re all gross and unsanitary.

He walks up to him and tries to create an air of confidence like the one Greta Bowie carried with her when he first met her. He taps the boy with the slicked back brown hair on the shoulder because he doesn’t want to risk talking again until he really has to. The boy swivels around and pulls down his shirt to hide the wrinkles, “Hi,” he breathes out, having to aim his gaze up because Bill is a bit taller than him, even now. He wants to say more but Bill succeeds in his confident persona and it just makes him seem more intimidating and foreboding to the anxious young Eddie.

“Hi, I’m Bill,” Bill says, even though Eddie probably knows that from when they went around the room, though he can’t be sure, maybe he’d drowned it out in his nervousness like Bill had for the few after himself. Better safe than sorry, he does know that this boy’s name is Eddie though, he was a few after Bill by the time he could finally focus again. “What’s your imaginary cat’s name?” he asks, not knowing that that may be an odd question to start on, making Eddie teeter awkwardly on his heels and toes back and forth for a moment before answering him.

“Alex, I call him Alex. it used to be something else but my mom says it’s not appropriate to name your animals Lucifer even though it’s from the Bible, I hear it at church all the time, it sounded cool,” the boy says with a shrug, looking Bill up and down to try and figure out why he would come and talk to him specifically. He’s tall and thin and even though he’s young he has lavender half moons beneath his eyes that show a lack of a proper sleep schedule. He has a bruise on his knee from falling off his bike and a cut on his lip from something he doesn’t want to talk about. He looks a little roughed up, his hair a fussed up mess of fire on top of his head. Eddie decides he may be intimidating at first, but his eyes show that he’s just as lonely as Eddie is. “Does your hamster have a name? I don’t think you said so either,” Eddie says, realizing how closely Bill is watching how he talks so he tries his best to move his lips instead of mumbling under his breath, he doesn’t want to ruin his first interaction with someone who might possibly actually want to be his friend.

“I d-do not really have a name for him, I just call h-him my little b-buh-buddy,” Bill says with a sheepish smile. He doesn’t see much of a point in naming him, he can’t hear himself talk to it and he’s the only one who really interacts with the pet. He signs at the little rodent sometimes too, he knows it can’t understand but that’s why he likes it. It can’t judge him or tell him he’s doing something wrong or said something completely weird and grammatically incorrect. The little buddy is just a living thing to talk and interact with without being scared. But now he’s talking to someone who can respond to him and try to make sense of it, it’s good practice but it’s also so much more real than talking to his hamster. He seems to be doing just fine though. He runs his hands through his hair in hopes of seeming like he actually cares about his appearance and looking good for the people around him, but really he doesn’t care too much most of the time, but he feels a little insecure seeing how put together Eddie looks and remembering what he looked like when he looked in the mirror on his way out this morning. He’s looked better but he’s also definitely looked much worse.

Eddie becomes easier to talk to through their time, it only takes a few corrections from Bill to get him talking in the way that Bill can get the most information out of. The enunciating and knowing what sounds his mouth should be making when he moves it a certain way. Bill still gets weird looks when he laughs so he tries to keep it quiet, it’s not his strong suit though because he can’t exactly tell how loud he’s being. He can only tell by the vibrations of his vocal cords. And the reactions of people around him. They talk about their pets, albeit Bill’s without a name and Eddie’s not really existing, though he does let Bill pet his imaginary cat before they’re told to all go back to their own seats. The next activity is drawing. They get to color in the picture with colors that represent their favorite things and other things about them. A way for the teacher to learn about them and for them to have fun at the same time. Bill gets a coloring page with a fluffy little dog on it, he thinks it’s cute and a good opportunity to color it in the same color as his own hair like part of their assignment is. The teacher puts on a show in the background, Dragon Tales. Bill can’t pay attention to it because the noise really means nothing to him and he wants to pay more attention to his coloring. He decides that he likes kindergarten by the time the day ends and it’s time for the bus to take the kids home. He teaches Eddie Kaspbrak to say goodbye in sign language and they exchange their goodbyes, feeling like it’s a secret language for just the two of them, no other kids will probably bother to learn much sign if they don’t talk to Bill on purpose.

The bus ride home is just as eventful as the one on the way to school had been, Bill looks out the window at the grass and the trees, he doesn’t go past his own front yard too often so he finds all of this exciting. He keeps his backpack on his shoulders as he stands up at his bus stop. He stands and sizes up his own house before going back inside. He used to think his own home was so big when it was almost his entire world, but the school has to be at least double the size and it makes him even more amazed at the fact that he’ll be there every day. He opens the screen door, the actual door still open to let in the warm fresh air but the screen there to keep bugs and leaves out. The notes of some Bach composure ring through the house from what his mom calls something along the lines of parlor, but Bill can’t be sure what sound that word makes, but she’s written it out for him. 

He toes off his shoes, some velcro sneakers, the usual for young boys who don’t have the time to stop and tie their laces. He carries his backpack on one shoulder on his way to the parlor, sliding on the wood floor in his thick white socks, the same as every other pair of socks he owns. He finds his mom at the piano, he may not be able to hear the music but he knows that’s where she spends a lot of her time. He likes to put his hands on the piano and feel the vibrations though, but his mom doesn’t like him leaving his sweaty hand prints on it, reminds him how expensive it is. He looks at his mom’s stomach, eyeing the way it’s been growing, trying to decide if the baby got any bigger while he was gone at school.

She notices his gaze, “Babies don’t grow that fast,” she says, making sure that she looks right at him and talks the same way he taught Eddie to today. She doesn’t want to learn sign because she doesn’t want to make her piano playing fingers sore from using them so much, but she does need to somehow talk to her son, especially to tell him what to do and all. “You need to take a bath tonight, wash your hair,” she says, tickling his scalp which makes him giggle. She isn’t always the best, in fact she isn’t great a lot of the time, but she’s still his mom so he still sees her as a source of comfort as long as she isn’t yelling or slamming things around.

He nods at the request, looking at her bump again with a yearnful smile. He wants a little brother, but he’ll probably be fine with a sister too. He drops his backpack on the floor and unzips it to pull out his green school take home folder, pulling out that piece of paper the teacher had given him to give his parents. He didn’t read it so he doesn’t know that it even talks about him being a Deaf student in the letter to let the parents know so they’re not surprised when their kids come home talking about it. He just shows it to Sharon and points at the line she’s supposed to put her signature on to make sure he doesn’t get in trouble by not getting it signed. It’s practically his first piece of homework, it surely needs to get done, there’s no way he already would want to look like a bad or irresponsible student, or even prove his parents to be bad or irresponsible parents.

He is proud of his first day though. He colored a dog red like the one Clifford from that silly cartoon and he learned the names of the kids who sit at his table (Janet, Henry, Greta, and Ed) and he made his first friend. That last part is the one that fills him with the most joy.


	3. it's high ho silver lining

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bill and Eddie get closer as friends as more years of school approach them. George is born and Bill is already unsure of how to appreciate him. He distracts himself with yet another friend, Richie Tozier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no beta we die unedited like men

Bill has gotten into the habit of signing out Eddie's name letter by letter Eddie which isn't much of a problem. He remembers his own side name from a kids speech therapy, one of the first other Deaf people he's ever talked to. his surname is important to him, the very few people actually use it. Eddie doesn't even really know about sign names or really Deaf culture at all. He's never given anyone a sign name for, it's pretty ceremonious in his opinion. It's like how important parents giving their newborn baby a name is, the name sticks. It takes about a month before the spark goes off and does mind. He knows what his hands will refer to Eddie as. The sign for fire comes to mine the striking sign that makes him visualize and orange and yellow blaze. Like the sun but close up. beautiful like the star but with an easier chance of getting burnt. Eddie is like fire, crackling and almost dangerous in a way it can a kindergartener can be. In the way that he knows so much, and has not an ounce of hesitancy to use that knowledge, for the good of others or otherwise. He replaces the loose fingers of the sign for fire with the sign for 'E'. Bill talks to his parents about his new fiery friend every night at the dinner table until they finally offered to let him have the boy over on one chili November afternoon. Bill lights up as he reads the offer in the subtle tugs their muscles make at their lips. He asked them to repeat themselves about four times before he realizes that he hasn't seen it wrong. Next day of school Bill runs up to Eddie as soon as his mom leaves him at the front of the school comments. He starts babbling out the invite but based on his expression, he probably wasn't successful at speaking this time, it was much too fast to be coherent. He tries again without the quick stutters this time. He signs as he talks now, maybe a little bit of hope that someone will pick up some side while they watch and listen to him. Bill doesn't have very high hopes for the other kids to learn, but it's worth a fair shot. 

Eddie's picked up on a bit of sign, he knows his own sign name, the alphabet, and a few simple words. To anyone else, seeing a young boy with minor knowledge of the gesture-based communication it wouldn't be too abnormal or special, but to Bill, it was absolutely incredible. He's never had someone learn sign for him, his parents don't even know much. Just a few commands here and there. Eddie is a godsend to him, someone to pull him out of his frequently lonely isolation. Dang, he decides, school is great.

why the friend aspect of school is better than you'd hoped, learning my lip reading was probably never the best idea. he hardly even knows many of the words he'll have to comprehend. It's a struggle. His parents had discussed the possibility of an interpreter many times over the summer, but they'd eventually come to the conclusion that he could use more practice lip reading. They figure that since he seems to pay attention in church, he could do it in class too. He doesn't want to ask for one at this point, so he pushes himself harder to be more like the other kids. To them, Deaf must be a bad word. To his parents, it's been troublesome and expensive. And now, to Bill, he's never disliked his Deafness more. His grades may go up but his self-esteem continues to plummet.

Eddie does get permission to have a playdate with Bill, the song and does not permit him to go to the Denbrough house. she thinks he's fragile. His own home is his carefully crafted habitat, she doesn't like him going to other people's homes. Heck, she thinks the Derry Eementary School is a germ infested cage. Her skin crawls whatever she thinks of her little Edward there. Having bill over was even stretch for her, but he begged enough to wear her down to agreeing to have him over on a Friday afternoon.

 

Eddie's house is not like how Bill would have imagined it based on what he knows about Eddie and his mom. She seems like she should be neat and tidy along with her cleanliness obsession, but she's nothing short of a hoarder. She orders too much online, hardly even ever opening them, the boxes get stacked in piles against the living room walls. Bill doesn't let his surprise show when he walks in though, he's scared to be rude to the mother of his only friend. She says uninterested hello to him before Eddie is quick to pull Bill upstairs to show him his room. he's not yet old enough to constantly be ashamed of his mom, only during her outburst, but the idea of showing his friend his neat room is too exciting to wait just another moment. Not long enough for greetings, and not long enough for him to explain to his mom that his only friend is Deaf. She would approve, she maybe even be so strung out that she wouldn't let any talk to Bill anymore. Her boy is already an outcast, little does she know or realize that is because of her.

Eddie's room is one of his favorite places, it's not as neat and tidy but it's clean and it's his. His walls are cool toned blue, not far off from the cornflower blue if those eyes. The hardwood floors continue from the hall into his room, the slate brown suffered from years of tiny feet dragging across the surface. But best of all is right in the middle of the room. His train rug. It's green with tan dirt roads and wide, Brown track straw his trains across. The trains themselves in a plastic tub so it away under his bed. Greta Bowie may be the horse-loving little girl of their class, but Eddie is definitely the Tonka trucks and trains obsessed little boy. he pops himself on the outskirts of the rug, padding a spot next to him while he reaches for the bucket of toys. Bill takes the gesture to sit down and does just that.

"Trains?" he signs with a puzzled look. Eddie had only talked about trains once or twice, and never brought up this awesome rug. It's like a little boy's dream.

"Trains," Eddie mimics design Bill had done with a confident but goofy grin on his face. He can tell Bill likes his set, and when Bill likes something of his it always makes him feel warm and fuzzy inside. when Bill thinks that something about him is special and makes him feel even more special. Bill has his first friend and he's Bill's, and that's something that can never change or be undone. 

the crawl around making the trains crash into each other and go flying around the room. Eddie wouldn’t normally wouldn't Mumble his usually sound effects out loud with others around, Bill's inability to hear it brings him a sense of comfort. Besides, if Bill could hear him, he's different from how Eddie's weird aunt seem to enjoy anything childish he does, watching him grow up because they themselves have not yet been put on a maternal path. Bill's friend, he learns every day how he's different from the family he's been given. He'll learn in the next few years that friends are the family he gets to choose.

The afternoon goes on without any problems, hardly even any Sonia incidents. Bill's mom comes to pick him up at 6, right before the Kaspbrak duo is about to sit down for dinner. And he goes to sign goodbye to Bill before he can poise his arm, Bill has gone in for a tight hug. Eddie almost squirms away before he realizes that it's actually sort of nice to hug Bill, bony elbows and all. Before he knows it, he pulls away and signs a final goodbye for the night. 

"See you later, firecracker," the signs as he walks back to his mom's car. I didn't know for sure that he wants to be friends with Bill forever, and that sign language looks really cool when you get good at it.

play dates, regular Friday occurrence for the two of them. And by the summer before first grade, Friday planets turn into bike rides around the small neighborhoods. The good and quiet kids they once were become more bubbly and cheerful, but mostly only in each other's presence. the Sharon and Zach don't much notice the change in their son, caught up with the end of their second pregnancy together. Bill's younger brother, George Elmer Denbrough is born only two weeks before Bill's 6th birthday. the combination of two young parents with two young kids even more chaotic than they thought it would be.

Bill spends his birthday at the playground with Eddie, a package of chips ahoy and some kid named Richie who didn't know very well but really didn't take the hint that by now, Eddie and Bill have their own two-person games that they like to play alone. They do like to play pretend, though. And Richie can be very good at that. Richie goes the whole extra mile to pretend, squinting one eye shut and walking as if he had a peg leg. He plays pretty good villain so they let him stick around. Making up stories is so much easier when there's a villain, Bill learns, most of his stories up to this day have been happy and near monotonous. He hasn't yet learned that real life has really was too, he only knows mild inconveniences.

the first of many being his baby brother. He really does want to love George, but he's pink and small near impossible to communicate with. Cartoons like having siblings seem so much better and ten times more funner than Bill has experienced. Even further is that while his parents didn't always have time for him before, now they never seem to. He spends more time out of the house when summer comes. Richie becomes a more permanent figure in playtime with Eddie, they've become like an off-brand kindergarten version of The three musketeers. But they see themselves as just that powerful and united.

take steady at least three straight days get Richie to understand that being louder won't actually make Bill hear him, only give Eddie a terrible headache. Which doesn't catch on science quickest Eddie had, but he slowly but surely can get stumbly fingers to form words and phrases. Some kids will get impatient not being able to communicate well with their friends, but even with young and immature minds, their willingness to learn makes him almost cry in solidarity.

Summer is a magical three months for the three of them. The bike and run around his kids should. The Toziers even take them to the beach a few times, Bill learns that he loves the water. The spray of a splash of water running down his skin, hugging his swim shirt even more fitted to his small form. For the three musketeers they've become, summer is like the movies.

Their first trip to the beach is on July 4th. Sharon and Zack a home with him now teething Georgie, and Eddie's mom is busy entertaining his aunts, it was her turn to host the holiday. Was a blessing that she let him go, but she figured it would be easier to gossip about his young and impressionable ears there to snoop.

the three boys giggle and shriek as they splash the water around at each other, taking their toes into the sand. It's some of the best fun they’ve ever had. The sun doesn't stay up for very long, and it had already been late in the afternoon when they arrived. and the Rosy Glow of the setting sun takes over, the boy stood on the patchwork blanket and eat the BLTs the Toziers had packed.

The blue-gray sky shows silver stars glittering like sequins, Wentworth tells them to dry off and get ready for the fireworks. They do as told, drawing themselves and putting their shirts on before settling on the blanket. The fireworks show truly is wonderful this year. The lights or through the sky with a boom of energy that bill feels vibrate and fizzle out in his chest. it really is magical. The first magical summer of many for him and his friends.


End file.
